In The Company Of The Courtesan

''The pre-eminent novelist of Renaissance Italy'' S. J. PARRIS, OBSERVER

''Dunant triumphs, like all good novelists: in a deft, shrewd, precise use of killer detail'' CHRISTOBEL KENT, GUARDIAN

''She writes like a painter, and thinks like a philosopher . . . A tour de force of storytelling'' AMANDA FOREMAN

''A writer of powerful historical imagination and wicked literary gifts'' SIMON SCHAMA

With their stomachs churning on the jewels they have swallowed, the courtesan Fiammetta and her companion dwarf Bucino escape the sack of Rome. It''s 1527. They head for the shimmering, decadent city of Venice. Sarah Dunant''s epic novel of sixteenth-century Renaissance Italy is a story about the sins of pleasure and the pleasures of sin, an intoxicating mix of fact and fiction, and a dazzling portait of one of the worlds greatest cities at its most potent moment in history.